Fabrication of CdTe/NiTe films on Ni foils by radio-frequency magnetron sputtering method

Mu, Yannan; Zhou, Xiaoming; Yao, Huizhen; Su, Shi; Lv, Pin; Chen, Yanli; Wang, Jun; Fu, Wuyou; Song, Wenxu; Yang, Haibin

doi:10.1016/j.jallcom.2014.12.203

Cited by 12 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 54 publications

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“…Various techniques have been employed to deposit CdTe films, such as, closed space sublimation [4], electron beam evaporation [5], RF magneto sputtering [6], hot wall epitaxy [7], pulsed laser deposition [8], pulsed laser evaporation [9], molecular beam epitaxy [10], chemical vapor deposition [11], electrodeposition [12] and thermal evaporation [13]. Out of these methods, thermal evaporation stands out due to its low level of impurity presence in the growing layer, low trend of oxide formation, straight-line propagation of vapors from source to substrate, high deposition rate, low material consumption as well as low cost of operation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effect of post deposition heat treatment on microstructure parameters, optical constants and composition of thermally evaporated CdTe thin films

Kumarasinghe

Dissanayake

Pemasiri

et al. 2017

Materials Science in Semiconductor Processing

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Thin film microstructure and its properties can be effectively altered with post deposition heat treatments. In this respect, CdTe thin films were deposited on glass substrates at a substrate temperature of 200 °C using thermal evaporation technique, followed by air annealing at different temperatures from 200 to 500 °C. Structural analysis reveals that CdTe thin films have a cubic zincblend structure with two oxide phases related to CdTe 2 O 5 and CdTeO 3 at annealing temperature of 400 and 500 °C respectively. Regardless of the annealing temperature, the plane (111) was found to be the preferred orientation for all films. The crystallite size was observed to increase with annealing temperature. All films were found to display higher lattice parameters than the standard, and hence found to carry a compressive stress. Optical measurements suggest high uniformity of films both before and after post deposition heat treatment. Films annealed at 400 °C displayed superior optical properties due to its high refractive index, optical conductivity, relative density and low disorder. Furthermore, according to the compositional measurements, CdTe thin films were found to exhibit Te rich and Cd rich nature at regions near the substrate and center of the film respectively, for all annealing temperatures. However, composition of the regions near the substrate was found to become more Te rich with increasing annealing temperature. The study suggests that changing the annealing temperature as a post deposition treatment affects structural and optical properties of CdTe thin film as well as its composition. According to the observations, films annealed at 400 °C can be concluded to be the best films for photovoltaic applications due to its superior optical and structural properties.

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